The present invention relates to a method for processing tobacco to remove agents from the tobacco which are believed to be harmful.
In the face of repeated warnings by the American Cancer Society, the American Medical Association and other such organizations, legal requirements that warnings be placed on the outside of the cigarette packages and in all advertisements for cigarettes, and in spite of laws banning the advertising of cigarettes in certain media, cigarette smoking in the United States has not been substantially reduced. In fact, the net effect of the above activity seems to have been to make the smoking public immune from such warnings and advertisements, and cigarette smoking has recently begun to increase. Since the measures taken so far to combat cigarette smoking have been fundamentally unsuccessful, the only feasible alternative appears to be the provision of a cigarette which is safe to smoke and which is not physically addictive and the Federal Trade Commission has recently issued a report urging research toward this end.
Attempts to date to produce such a safe cigarette have been almost totally unsuccessful. One of the methods which has been attempted to reduce somewhat the dangers of cigarette smoking is to freeze dry the tobacco as described in the patent to Abbott et al., U.S. Pat. No. 3,704,716. The primary purpose of this method is to expand the tobacco into a larger volume so that less tobacco is used to make each cigarette rather than actually remove the harmful agents from the tobacco. It has been determined in tests conducted by the National Cancer Institute of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare that tar and nicotine levels of cigarettes are not substantially reduced by freeze drying processes now used. To the best of our knowledge, no other method has been advanced which successfully reduces the harmful agents present or produced in the tobacco used in today's cigarette.